Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

That was it. I was just an ordinary guy she remembered liking; that is, part of life’s untouched potential, Jim.

But these people, one now breaking through into the dingy, dim vestibule, made me matter, when all I had wanted was a few words with one of them — or did I, now? And, expecting to see in the corner of my eye the light turning round and round like a lighthouse on the roof of a squad car closing fast to double-park hopefully at a scene of perpetration, I heard a whirring close to me and knew it by a foreknowledge of what I later knew there was no getting round, and I made my move toward the outer door calling to the loved figure opening it, "All I want—" as the loved figure replied as she was joined and half dragged inside by the father, not as if I was exactly covering them (right?), "Go ahead and tell him." And I heard my name and a clank behind me, and knew it was a bike leant against a car, and, at the same time as my name, the father saying, "I’ll talk to him, I’ll talk to him." But he’d already sent me the messages: sent them with my help between playground fence and newspaper store whose proprietress had phoned him the info he’d kept from his daughter until just now; sent me the messages with the help also of his future son-in-law. For Kallman was here, his hands came down upon me like the /^meditation that I claimed later to no avail, for they narrowed the scope of my arms and hands (his too), dropping my right hand into my jacket pocket; so as we fell together I could do nothing but, first, gripping Mrs. Erhard’s pistol, hold it away from me inside my pocket; and then, hearing Miriam shout, "You’re an asshole, George," as her father ripped her dress, I saved my leather pocket by lifting the pistol up out of it and touching it off like pricking a balloon, firing wildly at her father who was tugging at her from behind the glass-paned front door, with a City inspection sticker on the upper right corner and a cardboard cup sailing down half empty from someone’s window to hit me cheek and roll away with great commotion where I lay trying to recall where I was, and what was important, my right hand alone on the sidewalk hurting like a tooth with a terrible cavity, my arms not held now but without value, Jim, like I had always been close to marginal and now was for good. But I heard a voice saying "Miriam" more than once and a voice saying, "Blow in my ear"; and I knew that whoever those warm words had been said to, the voice was mine and I must become its breath, wherever you are, Jim. And I got to stop thinking there’s what was and what will be, and start thinking there’s a story in between.

Who are we, then, Jim? — you to come here with something to tell us or more like a thing you would get out of me, when we were in connection all the time by colloidal particles. They won’t tell you. Don’t ask. Don’t ask and then maybe they will tell you. The bad raps. The lawyers who didn’t show, the lovers who were too prompt, the lawyers who overdid it in court. The say-so of some mouth in a bar at two in the morning, circumstantial hearsay that helps get you eight to twenty if you can believe in it. The guy who came back to his old apartment because he had been in love there and they hadn’t changed the locks and a new tenant was there and he scared her to death and stole some money and some grass. The guy who could hear such fine and delicate sounds that nobody believed anything he said. The woman who was in a holdup in a supermarket and didn’t remember all that she had had in her pocketbook that had been taken off her until the perpetrator came to her home, and ate an avocado before exacting one long desperate kiss from her.

I have looked for the things that endure and recur, what rules hold firm, and in Foleynomics have urged landscape gardening within the walls where you can see it.

When I engaged the Chilean economist in conversation never guessing he had an Irish name, I was pushing a broom and had heard someone say behind me, "Nobody comes to see Foley," which was because I told them not to, being in a large enough communication to do without visitors as well as the vending machines that line the walls. I know distances. Down the gallery I hear a message; it’s six snores and four dream-curses off, and one astral projection from here to New York down hairpin parkways that throw you always back. And the message is no less margin than are visitors, but it has been passed to Efrain by the man the Chilean came first to visit who was never Efrain’s friend until a week before Efrain, who had lost good time he thought in the Box where he had nursed one and a half busted ribs for curtaining his cell and expected his parole to be held up a month at least, unexpectedly was released from here as if his recent Box time counted: which wasn’t the newsbreak you were after (smile) when first you joined us, for you named, bless you, space-time’s Colloidal Unconscious, having half-sensed its power in yourself and homed on another center of it, where you know at last what no one else knows — not Miriam’s father who looks for her at twilight in garbage can after garbage can of chicken limbs and leftover wordburgers of our nation’s half-read magazines, and is not sufficiently developed to get through to me; and not even the red-headed black kid who helped me ritually drown the kid from parochial school with white eyebrows: he, not Miriam, is the one I think of, with true guilt never spoken, never stood up for in court, for after what we did to him at camp that kid never slept again, so great was his fear confronted with the dividing and dividing particles of air he had such a quick concept of, there under the float, but no inner resources to find multiplied in connections among all our minds; and so some nights, when Miriam joins Larry, and, however good and friendly you’ve been, you merge with Spence, and the Chilean economist’s wife imperils her own husband-mate by enlisting his brother who while in Philadelphia sees not only an opera star’s recital but that lady’s dangerous paramour visit some old, ill printer who answers, "Very possible," to each query and returns wisely to firmer ground, which is that a female relative by marriage once put Andrew Jackson everlastingly in her debt by ordering for him in a tavern a radical if not quite borderline-toxic colloid to allay if not suspend his dyspepsia (if not his desire) but, too, his hunt for her beloved who sat back in the shadows of that tavern having let himself be disarmed by his beloved who later herself got rid of the darkly engraved pistol not by throwing it into the river they had both seen from end to end and on spring days when a woman and a man might spear the great bodies of the sturgeon running upriver above Albany, but by slipping it to a reporter-diarist in the shadows of another corner of that tavern, friend of Jackson and of his namesake Andrew J. Downing, protege of the Austrian consul general with whom he had collected mineral samples on walks in the Hudson Highlands but, more important, ideas of landscape and gentility whence to emerge as a great American builder and planter — on such nights, I say, even some twilight payload of a mountain moving our way to be deposited somewhere in this general region of the Northeast so that only those in active possession of Colloidal Unconscious will resist the bent of that mountain to make us think that it was always there and that we have found how to make our living together — on such nights I think less of Miriam, whose fate her father dare not take responsibility for, than of all those roadblocks the kid we scared must have had to draw near and bend himself around all his life. And so, Jim, for I am with you even if you have taken your message whatever it was away with you never in body to come back, we have reached a simple truth. If prison is irrelevant to the work of the heart, lasting time inside’s mere transiency, too. Therefore, it does not exist. So as for escape, who needs it?